The Annual Country Reviews reflect upon current land issues in the Mekong Region, and has been produced for researchers, practitioners and policy advocates operating in the field. Specialists have been selected from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam to briefly answer the following two questions:

1. What are the most pressing issues involving land governance in your country?

2. What are the most important issues for the researcher on land?

Key points

• Global availability of land ownership and land deals data is patchy, but, when available, it has been used by individual citizens, entrepreneurs, civil society, and journalists.

• Over the last decade, a number of responsible data lessons have been learned. These lessons can provide guidance on how to balance transparency and privacy and on how to draw research conclusions from partial data.

Ten years after the Global Financial Crisis, this research examines how resilience theory and rhetoric relating to the economy and housing markets has been translated into policy and practice. The methodology involves a case study of a city (Auckland) with a nationally dominant housing market and high unaffordability. Via secondary literature and a series of interviews we analyse questions connected to resilience from what, how, by whom, and discuss the implications and limits of the approach.

As a response to the environmentally and socially destructive practices of post-war mechanization and intensification, the concept of sustainable agriculture has become prominent in research, policy, and practice. Sustainable agriculture aims to balance the economic, environmental, and social aspects of farming, creating a resilient farming system in the long-term. Over the last few decades, various concepts have been used in research and policy to encourage the adoption of sustainable practices.

Offsets for compensating biodiversity loss are increasingly suggested as a system for allocating responsibilities onto those actors who contribute to the loss. As the mechanism is outlined as a new opportunity, the expectations need to be analyzed relative to the ensuing changes in rights and responsibilities over biodiversity degradation, conservation and restoration. In this paper we conduct an analysis of rights and responsibilities using literature and empirical material.

Most of the land in sub-Saharan Africa is governed under various forms of customary tenure. Over the past three decades a quiet paradigm shift has been taking place transforming the way such landl is governed. Driven in part by adaptations to changing context but also accelerated by neo-liberal reforms, this shift has created a ‘new’ customary tenure in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper reviews some of the evidence and analyses the ways in which this neo-liberalisation of customary tenure has been transforming relations of production and how land is governed in sub-Saharan Africa.

Boserup’s pioneering theory holds that rising population density can be accompanied by sustainable agricultural intensification. But can this positive relationship be sustained indefinitely, or are there conditions under which rising population density can lead to declining agricultural productivity? This study utilizes survey data on farm households in Kenya and soil samples on their main maize plots to assess whether Boserupian agricultural intensification is sustainable at high population densities.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of irrigation delivery services and agricultural extension services on crop choice in southern Tajikistan. This analysis is motivated by the government’s recent efforts to address the country’s severe malnutrition problem by supporting changes in irrigation service delivery and agronomy to increase diversity in agricultural production and consumption, in an environment where the cultivation of cotton had, until recently, been mandatory.

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The natural salt meadows of Tilopozo in the hyperarid, Atacama Desert of northern Chile, which are located at approximately 2800 m above sea level, are under pressure from industrial activity, and cultivation and grazing by local communities. In this research, the land surface covered by salt meadow vegetation was estimated from normalized difference vegetation indices (NDVI) derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM), Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) and Operational Land Imager (OLI) data from 1985 to 2016.

Empirical studies of farm outcomes that rely on survey data often find important roles for education and gender. However, relatively few studies consider either field of study or gender of the decision maker (as opposed to gender of the survey respondent). This paper evaluates how the field of education and gender of decision makers correlate with profitability, farm management, future intentions, risk and norms, and adoption of novel technologies in New Zealand, explicitly accounting for the fact that many farming households make decisions jointly.

Despite global recognition of the social, economic and ecological impacts of deforestation, the world is losing forests at an alarming rate. Global and regional efforts by policymakers and donors to reduce deforestation need science-driven information on where forest loss is happening, and where it may happen in the future.